CBN: Isaac Prayed Away from RNC

This is the kind of vile idiocy that just enrages me. CBN did a report on the Republican National Convention and quotes Christians from Florida saying that God responded to their prayers and moved Hurricane Isaac so it wouldn’t hit them. Really? So the people in Alabama and Louisiana weren’t praying? Or not enough of them were praying? Or God just likes you better than them? Or they deserve the destruction more than you do?

httpv://youtu.be/9aH0RLmOANg

Please, tell us all why it’s such a good thing that God decided to bring death and destruction to someone else rather than you. And tell us again how all-loving and wonderful your God is. And you know what makes it even more annoying? If the hurricane had hit Tampa directly, these same irrational people would not have decided that it means God doesn’t answer prayers. And the people of Alabama and Louisiana who were also praying that it not hit them won’t take it as evidence that their prayers don’t work. So let’s recap:

1. If a hurricane hits Place A, God is sending a message to them — a message that just happens to confirm all the preexisting bigotries of the people decoding the message.

2. If the hurricane doesn’t hit Place A, it’s because they prayed it away to hit another place.

3. If the hurricane hits Place B, the fact that large numbers of local residents were also praying for the hurricane not to hit them is meaningless to the inhabitants of Place A.

4. No matter what happens, residents of both Place A and Place B will continue to believe the same thing about eventualities 1 and 2.

Silly, everyone knows New Orleans is full of sinners and N-words! They deserve to be punished.

Die Anyway

Hah! Another X on my RNC Bingo card.

Michael Heath

Ed writes:

Faith — keeping people impervious to logic for thousands of years.

With no help by any authority, including my liberal college experience, I had to learn the hard way at far too advanced an age that faith is a juvenile character defect, with no redeeming attributes. An attribute humanity in developed economies should have abandoned by the end of the 19th Century.

I’ve since concluded that sports is incredibly effective enabler of religion, and a somewhat stealth enabler at that. Primarily by doing such an effective job of defectively conflating faith with other diffferent attributes in a manner that has even the liberal media celebrating faith. I’ve concluded this in spite of my still identifying myself as a jock. In fact it was a celebrated biography of Vince Lombardi published in the 1990s which revealed that faith wasn’t what caused the Packers to see so successful in the Lombardi years, but instead a commitment to intelligence, process, and technique.

One hope I have for the new atheists is that they effectively challenge the notion faith is a feature instead of a thoroughly toxic bug; that at least all of us, including religionists, are forced to authentically test how credible faith is when it comes to making wise decisions. I realize Christianists will be able to mostly avoid such tests, but those tests should be bandied about in the public square; they should be “outed”.

Currently those who are faithful in some aspects of their life can still be successful in other areas by compartmentalizing when they employ or ignore faith. I conclude those who are able to do this do so unconsciously, another reason we need more debate about faith in the public square. However I think the cost of such compartmentalization is now exponentially rising given the increasing purity of the Republican party, which is effectively tearing down those compartmentalizing walls amongst its individuals as well as advancing the faith of conservative Christians into public policy or far worse yet, obstructing good policy like we see with the threat of global warming.

donalbain

Its the laugh that sickens me.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1468751142 Kevin

The only acceptable weather miracle from an all-powerful deity would be the magical and immediate dissipation of said weather event before it could do damage to any living creature.

http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com/ Bronze Dog

I had a disturbing thought: Fantasy setting with capricious gods and spirits. Tribes of people would try to placate these beings, which usually meant redirecting the various curses and disasters on some other tribe. Everyone in the favored tribe would be okay with it because their neighbors aren’t “real people.” If disaster fell on one tribe, they’d blame it on whoever got favor from the responsible deity. No one thinks to question why the gods make them play the destructive game, or how life would be better if all the tribes stopped the blame game and helped each other regardless of who was hit by disaster.

iknklast

I was privy to a conversation about a year ago that has stuck with me and caused me much anger, raving, and ranting. Two women I know were talking about how god had save them – one who nearly died at birth, the other was saved when god reached back into the past and saved her mother, who nearly died at birth (with these parameters, we could all find something in the past to say god was leading to us – that chimp ancestor that nearly choked on a banana in the early Holocene? He was my great-great-great……great-grandfather, and he lived, so clearly god).

And at least one of these women knew exactly why she was saved – so she could be a writer (she writes romance – Christian romance – ewww). Because god could see 65 years ago the current shortage of romance writers – wait a minute, strike that.

The worst of it? At the moment this e-mail exchange beeped into my inbox, I was putting the finishing touches on a lecture I would be delivering the next day, which stated that the majority of those who die of malaria are children. I had just a minute before cited the statistics about how many children die of hunger every year. The only clear conclusion is that this woman is important, and those aren’t. I was sickened by my disgust, and I remain sickened to this day. It’s difficult for me to have any sort of relationship with that woman at all, but I’m currently in a position that calls for it. So I am often in the position of Rick Santorum – I want to throw up. Or slap her. Or something.

iangould

So when will Louisiana be suing CSN for the property damage?

tfkreference

Michael Heath’s comment reminds me of a line in Stephen Colbert’s book, where he quotes God as saying something like: I used to answer prayers about sports, but now I just let whichever team is better win.